hi this is Brett Ingram entrepreneur and award-winning product Creator and today I want to help answer the question how do you get traffic to your website so if our products and our services are the car that drives us to wealth and success then visitors leads and Prospects we'll just bundle them all under the term traffic for right now is basically the gas or it's the electric battery in our car that gets us there so no matter how great or life-changing our products and services are or that we think they are ultimately if no one sees them they can't buy them and we go out of business so in traditional retail or offline business for years and years and you know decades and centuries even entrepreneurs and business owners knew in general that idea and so it was pretty obvious that what they would have to do is to take one or more of the typical steps to get customers and so normally what you would do is you'd go get retail space in a hight traffic area if you have any kind of a retail business where you're selling things then anything that is retail space hight trffic area you have a window to the street or whatever people are going to walk by they're going to see what you have to offer they're going to stop in and they may make a purchase or whatever so that's certainly one easy way the problem obviously with that is the expense of you know hight trffic areas in retail space but that's one way to certainly do it another way would be to advertise on radio it's lower cost than say television and depending on the kind of product or service you're selling it can be very coste effective it's cheaper to produce Those ads it's cheaper to run those ads and to pay for the advertising space as well so radio is another really common thing that people would use and then there are things like ads whether it's you know an ad in a you know newspaper or whatever um you may have Billboards um you know I see a lots of billboards for various different products and services for all sort of traditional kinds of businesses so everything from you know roofing contractors to you know lawyers and you know all these other kinds of things medical facilities there are billboards all over the place and again depending on your business model depending on what you're doing that's something that people might do and maybe even tv ads so if somebody had enough funding or maybe they had a tie to a local network where they're not running Nationwide ads it maybe the cost wouldn't be quite so bad to be able to produce some TV ads and then there's the other other methods like coupons in the paper you know not as many people read newspapers nowadays but there there are certainly um still some out there and you can put you know coupons or flyers or things like that in there there are Flyers there's Direct Mail Direct Mail was a very big way to advertise for a long time because it's ultimately costeffective and you can sort of control the cost based on how many people you send things to and then they have sort of those Groupon offline things where you can you can buy add space and put your little coupon in and one company mails them all out with a a whole packet of other ones so there's all these other kinds of things that traditionally businesses and entrepreneurs would use to be able to generate leads traffic and sales for their business and whether or not they were trying to get phone calls or walk-in business or you know whatever it is they could generate all that using those and those are tried andrue methods that pretty much everybody's familiar with they have a long history they have a universal understanding of how they work because there are things that have been around long enough and we've been on both sides of it we've seen the billboard as a customer you know if if we have a business maybe we've run a billboard but we certainly could understand the idea of putting up a billboard if we want even if we don't know the exact process if we wanted to figure it out it's pretty much right there in front of us but what about digital business or an online business or maybe even an offline business that wants to generate traffic leads and sales through their online presence or their website this is where things get a little bit crazier because it gets a little bit more confusing there's a lot less information out there and there's a lot of people that don't have an understanding of how all that stuff works and where the traffic is going to come from or how to generate it you're not really going to put a billboard up in general to drive traffic to your website I mean you could but I don't really see that being done very often and it's probably because it's not a great crossover audience so this is where things get a little bit more confusing because our website is no feel the dreams okay just because we build it doesn't mean the people will come you know in in feel the dreams they build the field out in the middle of the you know the baseball diamond out in the middle of the corn field and all the old historic players come back to play there well that would be fantastic if that's the way websites worked and web traffic and online business worked but unfortunately it's not quite that simple um we actually be need to take an active role if we want to be able to drive traffic and we want to be able to drive visitors to be able to get leads and sales for what we want to do and because this is you know relatively new and not that the internet is new but in terms of the whole digital marketing space it's evolving so rapidly there's so many new methods there's so many old older methods they're evolving and changing so rapidly and there's so much confusion around it that it isn't commonplace for most people to understand oh these are the steps that I take um they might understand intuitively I can run ads online you know obviously if you've been online any amount of time you know that there are digital ads banner ads things like that so that one's probably the easiest crossover method for people because it's pretty obvious right you might not know exactly how it all works again like the billboard but you do know that it's there and you know that it's a possibility the fact is there are more and sometimes better ways to generate traffic in easier ways but there is no Mystical Force that will just flood our website with traffic just because it's online so the idea that we're going to set up a website or some social media profiles and because we have something to sell people are going to flock to us desperate to get what we have is you know obviously fantasy land that kind of stuff doesn't happen happen especially nowadays there's so much competition there's so many websites and there's so many um you know there's so much digital marketing noise that we need to be much more active in the role in terms of what we do so the question becomes what options do we have and what are the benefits and drawbacks of each so if I have a website or I have a product or service that I want to be able to Market online digital or otherwise what can I do in order to get that out there and be able to actually generate traffic leads and sales well thankfully the good news is there actually are a lot of options so it just comes down to understanding them and choosing the method or methods that make the most sense for what it is that we're offering and who we are and where our audience hangs out and all that kind of other stuff and then once we've chosen it following through right so making it happen so let's run these down and we're going to do this in no particular order you know it's it's not that one is better than the other or not as good or whatever and it's also important to understand that there is some overlap so I'm going to cover some stuff that you'll see that they sort of connect or if you have an understanding of how it all works you might think well yeah but that's sort of that also that's true um but this is the easiest way to break it down in a in a way to understand it all so you can choose a method that's going to work the best for you so the first one that we want to cover is SEO search engine optimization so search engine optimization real simple it's a you know fancy technical term that basically just means we want to be able to get our website listed on the top of Google and other search engines when people type in a search for the kind of thing that we're selling so if I have a you know camping equipment store or company or website and I want to get traffic to my website for it and what I can do is one of the things that I sell is tents well if someone types into the search engine buy tent right I want my website to be listed on that first page because if it is it's something like or at least it used to be I don't know the current statistic it was about 90% of the traffic goes to the listings on the first page I think it's probably less than that now but even still the majority of the traffic if you're listed on page 15 chances are the person is going to have already found another option and clicked through and bought from them long before they ever see you so search engine optimization simply means trying to get to the number one spot on any search engine um for different keywords that people type in different searches that they type in and so there are searches that people type in when they're anxious to buy something they already know they want it they're not in the research phase like I said buy tent that's that's obviously high quality traffic because you know they want to buy a tent and so the idea is how do we get to that top page because the great thing about this the benefit of SEO is that it's all free anybody types that in we aren't paying for ads we aren't paying for traffic they're finding us they're clicking through they're searching our website and they're buying from us and we paid zero to get that traffic that's really really attractive which is also why as you might guess it's very competitive so a couple of the the big things about keywords are or about SEO are for your website it's to set up like the title The Meta tags things like that keywords that are embedded in your site and backlinks that link back to your site a backlink is simply a site a link back to your site from some third-party site the higher reputation that site has the more sort of Link juice you get from that and the higher you'll you'll rise up in the rankings and so SEO is one really great way um the pros and cons of it obviously it's free traffic so it's amazing it's targeted traffic because they're doing searches fantastic downside is it's super competitive especially for buying keywords and in you know user intent keywords where people want to buy from us and also very popular niches are super competitive the other thing is it's a long-term strategy if you need to generate traffic to your website tomorrow to start making sales SEO is not going to be the way to go now it doesn't mean you don't incorporate that also because the beautiful thing about SEO is once you've built it then you'll tend to continue to get traffic from that long term if you're doing it in a genuine way then the beautiful thing about that is it will generate traffic for you not just when it starts but continuously on and on and on all the way into the future so it's great but it does take time in general you're looking at depending on how competitive probably 6 months or more before you start seeing real result results but if you have a a real strategy and you go about doing it then you could be very successful with SEO to drive a ton of extra free traffic to your site so SEO is one thing a second thing that we can look at is online ads this again is probably very intuitive and simple to people because everybody can understand the idea of an ad you're scrolling you see this ad for something you click on it you click through and you buy great right because if you are targeted audience for whatever they're selling then when you see that ad you're much more likely to click on it so the popular places for for online ads are Facebook or meta Google runs text ads and image ads by the way uh video as well Instagram Tik Tok Twitter or X whatever you want to call it nowadays and then there are actually thirdparty ad services that will do these placements for you where they pick the networks and you choose the keywords and some other parameters and they go and they'll run your ads based on your budget and things like that now one of the great things about online ads is that they're almost instantaneous so you can set up an ad account with just about any of these services today and you can be running ads probably either later today or certainly by tomorrow so it's very quick in terms of turnaround and obviously it's uh the analytics that are built in are really nice so we don't need a lot of third-party software and stuff CU most of these ad networ understand that as an Advertiser you're not going to spend money if you don't understand what you're getting back for it so it's going to show you clickthrough rates it's going to show you you know conversion rates if you set it all up right you can get really good data about what's working and what's not the other thing is they all have built-in split testing so the beautiful thing about that is you're going to be able to test different ads against each other to see what's working the best you're going to be able to test different audiences you're going to be able to build it and grow that over time and evolve it the downside to online ads is that they can be super expensive it's a pretty mature uh Market at this point there are a lot of online advertisers that really know what they're doing so they know how to optimize everything they know how to get the best bang for the buck and they have funnels built in on the back end where they can afford to spend more money up front on an ad because they know that the money that they're going to make isn't just on the initial sale or click through but it's on the funnel that they built and so in general when you run online ads you need something more than just a transactional relationship with the customer or the visitor if you're selling tents and someone clicks through and you want them to buy your tent and that's all you ever sell to them you're going to struggle to make money using online ads because somebody else is going to be doing the same thing but they're going to be sending them a newsletter and follow-up ads and retargeting ads that sell them backpacks and Lantern turns and you know Survival equipment and knives and fishing poles and all these other things and so they're going to be making a lot more from that same customer so we need a little bit more of a sophisticated marketing setup in order to be effective with online ads in general again it doesn't mean we don't want to go there but we just want to have an understanding up front of what we're getting into before we take the plunge and think hey this is great I can start running ads tomorrow I'm going to start making sales Hallelujah it doesn't exactly work that way it'll be hard to profit that way but online ads can be almost instantaneous which is one of the great Parts third thing that we can do is we can use Affiliates now Affiliates um are you know very uh very simply other people that promote our products and services so they aren't sending you know website traffic per se they're sending visitors and targeted leads to our actual offers or to the things that we sell and so so the beautiful thing about Affiliates is we don't pay anything for the traffic we don't have to pay anything we only pay based on sales made Amazon most people know but some don't Amazon is one of the largest affiliate marketers on the planet they have an affiliate marketing program and if you have an affiliate link through them and you send traffic to their site for people to buy stuff they were already going to buy as an affiliate you get paid a percentage of that sale and so even Amazon does it Walmart does it a lot of big retailers do it but as an online business or any other product seller you can use that as your advertising budget and you pay it out as commissions to Affiliates for making sales the beautiful thing about this is there's no upfront cost so if they don't make any sales for you you don't spend anything the downside is once people start to make sales you may need to pay them a higher percentage you might actually be able to advertise and make sales for cheaper so you need to sort of weigh that the other issue with Affiliates is finding them so there are marketplaces online that exist where Affiliates are already congregating and if you can tap into one of those marketplaces and get them to promote that's great but Affiliates tend to be a relationship generated business in marketing method so uh affiliate marketing is one of the main ways that I Market both products for other people and products that I create and sell and it works really great but it took me a while to develop those relationships to get those Affiliates to promote for me so those are the pros and cons with Affiliates another thing we can look at is marketplaces groups and postings so there are places where you can advertise sort of if you will an online bulletin board where you're going to be able to put up information or links about your site and you can list your s your your site or your products in various marketplaces things like ClickBank or or JV zoo or Warrior plus just to name a few and those are mostly for digital products but you could do this for physical products as well you could also join like Facebook groups or you know forums and other things where you're able to create a profile and list your site and your stuff there and other postings where there are Boards out there where you can just put your ads and things like that and so the benefit of those is the vast majority of that stuff is pretty much free it's pretty easy it's pretty quick it's low hanging fruit the downside is it's not very scalable it's you know it's not very predictable and you're probably not going to get a ton of sales from that kind of stuff but it's at least a start and it's a place that you can go and then another method is social media marketing so in this particular um method what I'm defining that as is posting um so you're making you're creating social media profiles and then you're making posts about various things right you're connecting with other people so other people that are on those networks that you're using you are able you're trying to connect with them and engage with them you're commenting on what they're doing you're sharing what what they're creating as well so you're trying to build the community this is less about content we'll get to that in a minute and more about connecting more about engaging more about literally the social element of social media marketing so obviously the platforms for this are similar to ad platforms it's you know it's Facebook and meta it's Tik Tok it's Twitter it's you know Instagram it's all these sorts of of online um social media platforms where we can post we can connect we can engage we can comment we can share we can like and we can follow and the idea is by taking those activities in doing that with other people that have a similar audience to the audience we want hopefully they do it in return and over time we're able to develop enough of a following where we can start to promote our own stuff and benefit from that so again a positive of this is that it's in general free or very lowc cost right we just have to sort of engage a lot um you know it can be a a long-term strategy in the turn in the sense that people will continue to come to all of our stuff for a long time coming once we built it the downside of course is it is very time consuming because we need to be engaging all the time the more we're engaging the more we have a chance to get engaged back and it is a longer term strategy if you start to do this today you aren't going to be driving traffic to your site and your offers tomorrow it's going to take months to be able to generate enough for this to really make sense but it can be a strategy that's relatively lowc cost and if it's the kind of thing that you like to do then it can be certainly certainly something right in our wheelhouse and then the fifth thing that we want to talk about right now is content marketing now when I group content marketing what I'm talking about is blogging video logging right so video blogging podcasts press releases articles white papers all things that we're doing that we're creating actual content unique content not just respun or rehash stuff that other people did but our own content that we're creating that we're able to put it out there and post it so that way other people can read that engage with our content see we have value to offer and then follow the links back to our products and services when the when we create a demand by giving content that people engage with enjoy and get value from they want to know more about us naturally they want to know what products and services we have to offer and then what we sell and they want to buy from us and so content marketing while it overlaps with social media marketing and SEO I'm grouping it as a separate thing because it could be a YouTube channel a podcast it could be you know writing articles or blogging or any of these other kinds of things and again this is the great part about this is It's relatively lowcost or free and um it's once it's built it's something that will continue to grow on its own and we can grow it bigger and bigger and bigger to get free organic traffic the downside of it is that it's very labor intensive it takes a lot of work and you have to create content that people want so it has to be good it's not just a matter of going through the paces to do it and so those are sort of the pros and cons of those various things and so those are the main ways to drive traffic to to our online presence or our websites and you'll notice that there is some overlap between them the key is to find the strategy that resonates with our audience that we're also happy to dive head first into and embrace it because it's going to be something that's going to take time and energy to do it now there are a couple key points points that I think are super important here number one is I would always recommend starting with one or maybe two at most can add more later there's a tendency to want to jump in and do them all at once and that's great the problem is you become a jack of all trades and a master of none it becomes very difficult to be good or be effective with any of them if you don't understand them and you're trying to do too many at once start with one two at the most and if it's two they should be ones that over lap and then focus on getting becoming really good at that getting that up and running and then move on and add more the second Point that's important is that all of these methods can work so one isn't better than the other but none will work if we're just testing it out or kicking the tires we need to commit to it and be committed to making it work the third thing that's super important is we want to learn the method you know we may want to Outsource we may want to have somebody else do a lot of this for us and that's fine but I highly recommend that we actually learn the method as well because it's a skill right this is the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching a man to fish when we learn the method of how to generate traffic for our online presence we are learning how to fish once we know how to do that we can generate traffic for any of our online stuff forever going on into the future so it's an invaluable skill to understand understand if we're going to do it we might as well do it the right way and we might as well understand what we're doing so it's going to be vital to our long-term online success and the fourth Point that's super important is be patient understand that any of these methods may not work right out of the box even ads right you might start getting results right away but they might not be productive results they might not be successful results but that's okay the important thing is to be patient and give it time to work but at the same time be smart and observant so pay attention to the results we're getting we don't want to just put our head in the Sin and just go to work and never look up we want to make sure that we're looking at the trends are we getting close to our goal is the traffic getting better and better or is it not moving at all and over time we can adjust our approach to make modifications and constantly adjust to get to where we want to go so we need to be patient and give it time to work but we also want to be smart and obser erant and make sure we're at least getting closer to the goal even if it's an inch at a time so getting traffic leads and sales from websites and online marketing are different from traditional business for better and worse so the takeaway here is having an online presence like a website a Blog a podcast and social media profiles is super important today whether our main business is online or not but for our online presence to get traffic leads and sales for us we need to know and understand how online traffic works and have a plan to generate it for us when we do this right we can reap the benefits of a continuous stream of new targeted leads sales and profits
